Main Street Dollars

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Chicago’s typical asking rent reached $2,253 in July, up 5.1% from a year earlier, according to Zillow, one of the faster increases among the large metros the company tracks even though Chicago rarely shows up in headlines about expensive housing markets. The city’s rent growth now outpaces famously tight coastal markets like Los Angeles, up…

San Francisco asking rents are up 9.7 percent to $3,372 while Denver, Austin and San Antonio all fell

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San Francisco’s typical asking rent climbed 9.7% over the past year to $3,372, the fastest increase among the large metros Zillow tracks, while Denver fell 0.9%, Austin fell 0.9%, and San Antonio fell 1.8%. All four numbers come from the same July report, which means the national 2.3% rent figure is quietly hiding two opposite…

Affording the typical American home now takes about $99,800 in household income

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Comfortably affording the typical home purchase in the U.S. now takes close to $99,800 a year in household income, according to Zillow’s July housing data. That’s the income needed to cover a mortgage payment on a typical home without spending more than 30% of earnings on housing, the standard affordability threshold lenders and researchers generally…

Apartment building permits are down 31 percent from their 2022 peak

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Builders pulled permits for new apartment buildings at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 490,000 units in July, according to the Census Bureau and HUD’s joint construction report, down roughly 31% from where multifamily permitting stood at its 2022 peak. That’s a federal number, not a real estate company’s estimate, and it points at what…

Nearly 40 percent of rental listings carry a concession, and the apartment building boom behind them is over

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Two out of every five rental listings on Zillow offered some kind of concession in July, whether that’s a free month, waived fees, or a gift card for signing a lease. That’s up from roughly one in three a year ago, even as rents themselves are rising at their fastest pace in more than a…

Rents on single-family houses are rising nearly twice as fast as apartment rents

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The typical rent on a single-family house rose 3% over the past year, while the typical rent on an apartment climbed just 1.7%, according to Zillow’s July rental report. That’s nearly double the pace, and it marks a break from the past two years, when a historic wave of new apartment construction kept multifamily rents…

Wholesale eggs slipped to 66 cents a dozen, and the liquid egg that goes into packaged food costs about 7.5 cents

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in Groceries & Gas

Behind every dozen eggs sitting in a grocery store cooler is a second, mostly invisible price: what the eggs cost before they ever reach a store shelf. This week that number moved lower. Federal market data show the wholesale price for shell eggs in the Midwest slipped to 66 cents a dozen, while the eggs…

Twelve clean quarters of payroll deposits will stop an employer having to ask for penalty relief at all

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in Rule Changes

Small businesses that run their own payroll are getting their own version of the IRS’s new automatic penalty relief, and the bar for qualifying is measured in quarters, not years. Employers that have deposited payroll taxes and filed on time for twelve consecutive quarters, three straight years on a quarterly clock, will have failure-to-deposit penalties…

The IRS penalty break that erases a first late filing is being replaced by an automatic one

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in Rule Changes

The IRS is retiring one of its best-known taxpayer favors. First Time Abate, the penalty waiver that has let millions of otherwise compliant filers erase a single late-filing or late-payment penalty just by asking, is being phased out in favor of a process that requires no request at all. The change affects anyone who has…

A husband or wife who is not an American citizen can receive $194,000 in gifts this year before any gift tax applies

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